Reverse ShotA different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

Genevieve Yue

Genevieve Yue is an assistant professor of media and culture at Eugene Lang College, The New School, and a frequent contributor to Reverse Shot, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, and the Times Literary Supplement.

“I was filming this postcard, and my camera went [to my hand], and I thought instead of saying my hands are old with spots, I said, it’s a beautiful landscape. And in a way, it’s a way of being a filmmaker that my own age becomes a landscape.”

To the extent that eroticism is about arousing acceptable forms of sexual desire, then, Elle tries to separate its motivations: using sex because one needs it, i.e. to satisfy a compulsion or dominate another through rape (unerotic), or enjoying it as an end in itself (erotic).

Standard Gauge, at 35 minutes, was made using a 1000-foot reel of 16mm film (the running time purposefully matches the film’s subject; Fisher has often called himself a “literalist”). This extensive length occasioned, for Fisher, a complex orchestration of time and footage.

The film’s inherent drama could easily be heightened with manufactured dread and suspense, but Sissako relaxes the pace to gain a broader view. Instead of accentuating conflict, he details smaller moments of change.

The death of cinema has been heralded countless times over the past several decades, suggesting that we are well into its ghostly afterlife. Martin Scorsese’s Hugo surveys cinema from this postcinematic station, returning to the profound connection between childhood wonder and early cinema.

If the show traffics in lurid sex as a form of distraction, what are the real scandals being kept from view? Where might the actual crimes of this world, which is so closely modeled on our own, take place, and how might they impact us, the audience, if we dare to look?

It was not until the accident that she began shaping videos in the manner of her art works, assemblages of malleable forms: animal hide, resin, concrete, and, in an extended sense, her own body, the hand broken in three places.

As in her previous film, Fish Tank, Arnold is far more attentive to the nervy tempos of teenage life, caught in fleeting glimpses, than the lifeless and disappointing adults against whom her characters rebel.